Communication

I was talking to a friend of mine about her visit to the doctor for lower back pain and other unusual symptoms. She was asked if she was pregnant but told the doctor that that wouldn’t be possible. Towards the end of the consultation the doctor again suggested she may be pregnant, even though she had only had the earlier conversation a few minutes before.

Now was this doctor assuming she was lying, or had the doctor simply not heard a word she had said? Either way, it is not very comforting to know either one is not believed or one is not listened to. Or was the doctor simply so busy that she was preoccupied or forgetful during the consultation, listening but not really taking anything in?

My last interaction with a doctor was via phone and it didn’t go well. In fact, it was very much the same. I hope it wasn’t the same woman. I explained my symptoms, and quickly the doctor diagnosed a urinary infection but I assured her that was not the case. I kept repeating firmly that I did not have this condition, but she continued to not hear a word I was saying. However, by the end of about eight or nine minutes, she paused long enough to actually ask me, ‘’oh, so you don’t have a urinary infection?’’

It was frustrating, but what was worse was the fact that there were probably a number of other women being treated in exactly the same way and perhaps being given incorrect diagnoses and the wrong medication to fix their ‘problems’.

I have had enough urinary infections in my time to know whether I have one or not. Plus, I am a registered nurse. I do have medical knowledge.

I am beginning to think these two cases could be from the same doctor because the method is very much the same. In my case, it was like she had a condition she thought I should have and wasn’t open to hearing anything else and the same with my friend. What about listening to the patient first before making the diagnosis?

When I was doing my healing work, one of the methods I used was to scan the body with my third eye. I had already seen what methamphetamine use looked like, which was the person’s head would appear as a hedgehog, with spikes protruding from the head with a thick coating over them. Removing the covering was like removing sticking plaster from a hedgehog. Something I found with this kind of work was that similar things on different people would look the same. I had one young woman come to me and I saw this pattern clearly. I asked her about methamphetamine use, which she strongly denied. I ran into her at a market a few weeks later, she pulled me aside and told me that she had remembered later that she had used the drug after all. I guess the shock of that coming out had caught her off guard. A similar thing happened with someone who had used cocaine. This was the first time I had seen this drug and although it was different to the methamphetamine, it was similar enough for me to assume she had been taking some kind of drug. I told her what I saw and that it was similar to, but not P. I questioned her drug use, which she denied. I asked if she was on any other kind of medication. She denied this as well. Again, when I next saw her, she admitted to cocaine usage.

I am just using these two examples in the doctor’s defence. Perhaps she sees so many people who incorrectly state their symptoms, or deny things that are obvious, that she has gotten into the habit of making her own conclusions regardless of what is said to her. One still needs to find that balance though, so that people who are telling the truth and who do know their bodies are given the credence they deserve.